Tools Hack Daily

Friday, April 27, 2018

A Pint-Sized Xenomorph Costume

Alien Day was yesterday, April 26 — it’s a reference to the moon in Aliens, designated LV-426. It’s never too late to celebrate a Xenomorph though, so we’re admiring a pint-sized Alien costume Replica Prop Forum (RPF) user Red2 made for his six-year-old son for Halloween 2017. Red2 built the creature from a base of insulation foam, hoses, and more. He explains his plans:

“So plan is to make the head from insulation foam with tube details from various hoses, and plastic wire sheathing. The jaw will be cut and molded out of EVA, and I think the teeth also. Hoping to get the jaw to work. Still figuring that out.
The body will be similar details, plus soft foam, EVA foam, and whatever works. I’m trying to find a used kids wet suit to chop up and layer upon. We’ll see if that ever surfaces.”

You can see the general shape coming together in the below picture.

Read more and see making of photos in this thread on The Aliens Legacy.

via The RPF on Facebook

Raspberry Pi Teaches You How to Start a CoderDojo #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Via Raspberry Pi

The course was developed by Philip, CoderDojo’s Educational Content Lead. It gives those who think empowering young people to be tech creators is important the resources and supports to achieve that goal by starting a Dojo. Divided over three weeks and running for about four hours in total, the course provides practical advice and resources on everything you need to know to plan and run a fun, social, and creative coding club for young people.

Learn more here.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Raspberry Pi Teaches You How to Start a CoderDojo #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Via Raspberry Pi

The course was developed by Philip, CoderDojo’s Educational Content Lead. It gives those who think empowering young people to be tech creators is important the resources and supports to achieve that goal by starting a Dojo. Divided over three weeks and running for about four hours in total, the course provides practical advice and resources on everything you need to know to plan and run a fun, social, and creative coding club for young people.

Learn more here.

whyBaby Sleep Analyzer with Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

from Patrick Flickinger via hackster.io

When I started this project, I was about to become a dad for the third time. This gives me gives me both, experience and necessity as I experienced the shortcomings of the baby monitors on the market and, now that baby Braden is here, I need to get more sleep!

Before we delve into what whyBaby is, let’s examine the options that currently exist on the market and why they just are not good enough. There exists three categories of monitors: audio monitors, video monitors, and motion monitors. All three preform their duties sufficiently, however, they are poor at handling other tasks. For instance, the motion monitors and video monitors incorporate audio, but the quality is sub-par, and the simple audio monitors only handle one task. Another problem with these systems is that they are active devices that require constant monitoring. There is very valuable information that can be obtained passively.

whyBaby is an attempt to rectify the issues that plague the existing monitors while employing passive data collection to help better understand baby’s preferred sleeping environment.

See full project breakdown here!

Raspberry Pi Polaroid with Thermal Paper #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Via Raspberry Pi

A crafty maker called Mitxela has taken an old Polaroid camera and converted it to use a Raspberry Pi Zero and a thermal printer. The build itself is interesting and involved replacing the innards with the necessary circuitry for the Pi and printer. Where the magic really lies, though, is in the software. Rather than using a stock Raspbian image, Mitxela crafted his own Linux distro using buildroot that shaves loads of time off the typical boot cycle, taking the boot down to around 2 seconds! For an embedded Pi project, that’s outstanding!

Wunderscan: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner New Life @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Scanner

Great project + write-up from Brian Carrigan.

I didn’t actually plan this project, but rather it found me. I was at the Scrap Exchange, a local reuse center, when I found a very nice looking scanner that you might find at a grocery store kiosk. It had been ripped from its connectors and had unlabeled wires hanging from it; a bit of hardware gore if such a thing exists. It was labelled on sale for $6.25, and a quick search revealed that it originally retailed at over $500. I thought a great use of this would be to keep near our pantry so that when we are out of a spice or snack, we could just scan the item and it would get posted to our shopping list. I figured I would try to reverse engineer it, and if all else fails, scrap it for the laser and motor. This is a longer post that goes through the entire process, so strap in!

Wunderscan: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner New Life @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Scanner

Great project + write-up from Brian Carrigan.

I didn’t actually plan this project, but rather it found me. I was at the Scrap Exchange, a local reuse center, when I found a very nice looking scanner that you might find at a grocery store kiosk. It had been ripped from its connectors and had unlabeled wires hanging from it; a bit of hardware gore if such a thing exists. It was labelled on sale for $6.25, and a quick search revealed that it originally retailed at over $500. I thought a great use of this would be to keep near our pantry so that when we are out of a spice or snack, we could just scan the item and it would get posted to our shopping list. I figured I would try to reverse engineer it, and if all else fails, scrap it for the laser and motor. This is a longer post that goes through the entire process, so strap in!